Sources of Joy: Flying to Germany

The countdown’s under an hour.

After months of planning and years of hoping, Dunreith, Aidan and I will be taking a cab to O’Hare Airport.

Our destination is Frankfurt, Germany, and, after that, Essen.

The relatively large industrial mainstay of the Ruhr Valley is significant to us for family reasons.

The Lowensteins lived in Essen and the surrounding communities for at least 150 years, according to a family tree in a bible my great-grandfather and namesake Joseph received as an anniversary from his eldest son Max.

That span ended, though, shortly after World War II began during the Nazi regime.

Dad left his hometown just before turning five years old and weeks after having had his appendix removed.  The family story says that my grandfather Max took him throughout the town to which he had returned after losing his hearing and the use of his right arm in World War I.

No doctor would operate on Dad because he was a Jewish child.

Eventually, Grandpa Max found someone who consented to perform the procedure in Papa’s Joseph’s stately three-story yellow home that doubled as an office.

Dad left after the surgery and has never been back.

Until now.

Thanks to the graciousness and persistence of a German teacher named Gabriele Thimm who is determined to teach her students the truth about their nation’s history and the possibility for living arises from such atrocity. we will be going as a family to the community Dad left almost exactly 73 years ago.

It promises to be an emotional time.

We’ll go to the homes in which Dad lived, have tea at Papa Joseph’s house, and see other sites of family significance.

We’ll also meet John and Maike Guntermann, a non-Jewish family ours has known for generations.  John’s father Karl was a patient of Papa Joseph’s and a print shop owner.  The two became friends, so much so that Papa Joseph entrusted the Guntermanns with our family bible shortly before he was deported to Theresienstadt.

I met John and Maike in 2004, when they shared with me a blue notebook that contained 65 years of correspondence between our families.

Letters explaining what had happened.

Receipts for care packages our family sent from America to a still devastated Germany.

Instructions from my grandfather about how to deal with reparations.

Holiday greeting cards.

The notebook unlocked a door that had previously been closed to a full understanding of my family’s history and helped me know much more viscerally from where I come.

On Monday, we’ll see the Guntermanns again as a family.

We’ll also attend a Festival of Life ceremony at the Great Synagogue in Essen, where Gabriele’s students and local dignitaries will present information about our family and then ask us questions.

I don’t know exactly what will happen, how Dad will react, and what, if any, memories will be triggered for him.

But I do know that I am enormously grateful that we’ll have gone together as a family to where he and so many of our ancestors lived, and, in so doing, will have fulfilled a deeply held desire.

The cab comes in 30 minutes.

 

Bill Simmons’ latest triumph: “30 for 30 Shorts”

You’ve got to hand it to Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy.

Not only has he carved out a distinctive niche of sportswriting that fuses personal  relationships, popular culture and sports analysis without going into locker rooms.

Not only has he been enormously productive and versatile, issuing forth books, columns, and podcasts at a dizzying rate.

Perhaps his greatest contribution will ultimately be as an incubator for other people’s work.

You can see it on Grantland, his ESPN-hosted site that has a stable of writers who weigh in on topics ranging from weekly Mad Men power rankings to homosexuality in sports to the minimum age level in the NBA to Simmons’ own musings.

You also can see it in “30 for 30,” the Peabody-award winning documentary series he successfully pitched to ESPN in honor of the network’s thirtieth anniversary.

Never lacking in either vision or moxie, Simmons has now convinced the bosses at ESPN to go for a second “30 for 30″ series.

But this time it’s in a different format-short films.

Here’s the rationale:

“Because “30 for 30″ needed its own Mini-Me. Because live streaming has gotten so reliably fast that we felt like we could pull this off. Because there are stories out there that we loved for four to 12 minutes, but maybe not for a full hour. Because talented filmmakers are usually juggling multiple projects, so sometimes it’s easier for them to take on a shorter project than a bigger one. Because we wanted you to waste more time on your iPad, or possibly rear-end the car in front of you as you’re watching these on your mobile device when you shouldn’t be watching these on your mobile device. Because Pete Rose bet we couldn’t do it. (Just kidding.) And most important, because we felt like there was a creative void sitting there for this specific form of storytelling. As you’ll see with our first short film, you might not want to spend an hour in Pete Rose’s world at this point of his life. But eight minutes? Absolutely.”

“Here Now,” the debut piece, covers those eight minutes with Pete Rose, the ever pugnacious and controversial all-time hit champ who’s set up shop for the past decade or so at Caesar’s Palace.

It makes for gripping, if somewhat bleak, viewing.

The New York Times explains that as the films roll out, they will be augmented on Grantland by podcasts, feature stories and oral histories.

Based on the first one, they’ll be well worth the time, as will be watching Simmons continue to forge his unique and visionary place in America’s sportswriting and cultural landscape.

Sources of Joy: Dart Society fundraiser countdown is on!

It’s almost here, people.

On Thursday morning at 6:00 a.m., I’ll board a flight to head to New York for our second annual Dart Society fundraiser.

We’re an international organization of journalists who cover issues of trauma and violence.  Our mission is to support each other so that we can tell those stories with compassion and sensitivity and to help each other deal with the emotional toll of doing that work.

It’s a community to which I’m proud to belong, and I’m thrilled to be heading back to New York.

Last year we gathered at gallery 25 CPW to honor our founder, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and heard speeches by feminist icon Gloria Steinem and nationally acclaimed author Jonathan Alter.

We also raised money for Dart Society Reports, our online magazine that debuted last August.

In this capacity we heard from Jacques Menasche, a member who was in the process of authoring a pair of stories and created a film about the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.  The pieces all were from the perspective of the students, teachers, parents and administrator in his son’s class, which was located right near Ground Zero.

This year, our theme is In The Zone, and we’re honoring Sebastian Junger, Committee to Protect Journalists Executive Director Joel Simon, and New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario.

It promises to be a rich and rewarding evening.

Along with Deirdre Stoelzle Graves, our executive director, many members have worked tirelessly to pull together the event.

As it did last year, the evening will include an auction of prints and books donated by many of our fabulous members.

I can’t wait to see everyone in the community as well as friends like fourth grade teacher, mentor and friend Paul Tamburello, childhood friends Julie Slotnick  Sturm and Amy Kantrowitz, and Dunreith’s former colleague and our friend Juan Castellanos.

I’ve put a lot of effort, energy, emotion and attention into the organization and the evening.

On Thursday, I can’t wait to be there and to soak it all in.

Thanks to all who have already donated.  For those who have not yet done so, please feel free to check out auction items and/or make a donation.

Sources of Joy: Happy Mother’s Day, Mothers!

I’ve written multiple times in this space that I am a fortunate man.

Today I felt that good fortune as I listened with Dunreith to the Grateful Dead as we made a safe journey through occasionally driving rain from dear friends Glenn and Michele Phillips’ house in Memphis to New Orleans.

I felt it as we picked up Aidan, who finished his first year exams at Tulane strong, earning extra credit for memorizing and reciting the first chapter of the Nichomachean Ethics.

I felt it, too, as we started to make the return trip home to Evanston, arriving safely in the early evening in Batesville, Mississippi.

Tomorrow, my good fortune will be to celebrate Mother’s Day with the mothers who have been important in my life.

I’m talking Dunreith, of course.

Without her, I would not be a father.

With her, I have had the great privilege to be involved in one of life’s most meaningful and (to me) important tasks: raising, living with, and learning from Aidan.

By all accounts, Dunreith has had an innate maternal instinct from her earliest years-she reports how she thought her mother had her younger brother Josh when she was 9 years old so that she’d have a real live doll to play with and care for-and it’s only deepened during the past 19 years as Aidan’s mom.

Simply put, she’s outstanding, blending unconditional love and acceptance with straight talk, encouragement with space, listening with counsel.

All of her interactions are drenched in the kind of love that comes from literally have carried and borne Aidan into the world.

I’m thrilled that we’ll have the day together as we drive the remaining 600 miles from Batesville to home.

My mother Alice Lowenstein is another source of great fortune and joy in my life.

Mom continues to teach, to nurture and to inspire me as she moves toward her 75th birthday. She’s had more than her share of physical struggles, from allergies to a devastating car accident to, in 2010, heart problems that resulted in her having a pacemaker inserted followed by a hip replacement.

In the past 16 months she’s worked hard to regain her strength, mobility and independence.

It’s not been easy.

Yet, far from begrudging the task in front of her. she’s come to a place of greater and greater happiness at being alive.

And speaking of being alive, tomorrow I’ll also think about the mothers who are no longer alive in body, yet whose spirits and gifts I will remember.

This mean Helen Kelly, my beloved late mother-in-law, who died last September. She was endlessly giving to her children, grandchildren, and, fortunately for me, her son-in-law.

Aidan once called Helen “the perfect grandmother.”

She was no worse as a mother.

The freshness of Helen’s passing will give a certain hue of sadness to the day, even as I’ll feel grateful to have had the years and memories with her that I and we did.

My stepmother Diane Lowenstein’s death is less recent-she passed in early July 2010-and I also will think about how she gave to me directly, and to our family indirectly through her loving relationship with Dad.

In the nearly quarter century they were together, Dad became a happier, more open,  and more emotionally available father.  Diane helped bring out that growth in him.  She was also enormously welcoming to, and generous toward, Dunreith and Aidan.

I hope that all of you celebrate the mothers in your lives past and present.

They deserve our celebration, our gratitude, our appreciation and our love.

The true reason for Sarkozy’s defeat: the triumph of Baya Benmahmound

What’s abundantly clear is that Nicolas Sarkozy was handed a decisive, if not historic, walloping that drove him and his conservative Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party from power.

The reason behind the defeat is less clear.

It’s not for a lack of trying.

Dear friend and frequent commenter Dan Middleton pointed to this radio piece from PRI that talked about Sarkozy the man and his repeated violations of French expectations of presidential behavior that he eventually was derisively dubbed “President Bling.”

On the other hand, this Washington Post piece pointed to Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party victory as a rejection of the austerity policies forged and endorsed by Sarkozy and his German counterpart Angela Merkel.

Me, I’ve got my own theory: it’s the triumph of Baya Benmahmoud.

For those not familiar with the free-spirited protagonist of Michel LeClerc’s satirical farce “The Names of Love,”  I’d put it right up to the top of your Netflix queue.  Not only does the film shed light on Hollande’s secret weapon, it also provides insight on some of France’s enduring silence of two of its most shameful episodes: the murder of the majority of French Jews during the Holocaust and World War II, and the brutal killing that took place under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle during the Algerian War.

Sara Forestier’s Baya, the child of a hippie mother and a penniless Algerian father, imbided radical politics in the air of her parents’ constantly full home.

In addition to being remarkably absent minded-in one of the film’s more silly scenes, she leaves a checkout line in a grocery store to return home, eventually ending up walking the street naked without realizing it-she has developed a very specific theory of political conversion.

Rather than convince right wingers of the error of their ways through dialogue, she sleeps them over to the left side of the political arena.

She actually ends up caring for Arthur Martin, a middle-aged and stiffly controlled scientist who idolizes former Socialist leader Lionel Jospin.

Martin’s family history centers on his mother, a Holocaust survivors whose parents, Greek Jews, were killed during World War II.

His mother and father both treat the past as to be denied at all costs.

For her part, Benmahmoud  is the victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her piano teacher-a violation that robbed her of her innocence and, she feels, musical gifts.

The story of this unlikely couple falling the traditional script of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl is hardly the point.

Rather LeClerc uses that basic plot line to explore all kinds of issues in French society.

The film ends with a pregnant Benmahmoud, who wrote a book detailing her adventures in literal sexual politics before leaving her chosen profession, realizing in horror that she may have voted for Sarkozy for president in 2007.

Martin’s reassurances as she’s pushing that her vote did not the make the difference in the 2 million vote margin by which President Bling defeated Socialist opponent Segolene Royal do not hold much sway.

Five years later, Hollande, Royal’s long-term partner and father of their four children, has emerged victorious.

No word yet from Benmahmoud, but I know the reason I’m putting at the top of the heap for the first Socialist triumph in 15 years.

Sources of Joy: Tieing up threads and weaving the quilt of life.

It’s been a hectic end of April and start of May that only promises to get more and more busy.

For starters, Jon and I traveled last week to western and central Iowa, where we explored small towns that had seen an increase in their Latino population.

On Thursday I wrote and put up a gallery of Jon’s images about one such trip to Clarion, Iowa, where we met Ramiro Salgado and his wife Dora Carvallo.  The couple owns one of the two Mexican stores in town-they stand across the street from each other-and opened a restaurant last year.

Meeting them was just one of the highlights of the trip, which also took us to West Liberty, the state’s first majority-Latino community.

We also drove to nearby Mt. Pleasant, where we went to church and were treated to a feast hosted by Oscar Argueta, a Morman and Republican from Guatemala who has, for the past twelve years, published a biweekly newspaper that caters to Latino residents in communities throughout Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois.

That’s to say nothing of speaking at Agnes Consadori Losi’s memorial service, getting ready to pull the strands together on our Hunt project, and get ready to head down to New Orleans to get Aidan, travel to New York for our fundraiser, cover NATO and then fly to Germany, where Dad will be visiting his hometown for the first time in 73 years.

In short, I’m not lacking for things to do and, yesterday, had my first day off in two weeks.

At such times, and precisely because things have been so hectic, I feel even more appreciative than usual to have the space and time to knock off outstanding tasks.

Today was one of those days.

After a walk with Dunreith and a stop for a fresh Everything bagel at Bagel Art, our favorite mid-walk stop, I was able to catch up on some email, invite a bunch of people to the Dart fundraiser, talk with Dad about our upcoming trip, take a yoga class, have some tasty samples at Whole Foods, pay some bills, and spoke with Mike and Jon about the timing to celebrate Mom’s 75th birthday.

Meanwhile, Dunreith made some of the final reservations for our time in Germany.

Accomplishing each of those tasks not only relieved the psychic pressure I felt at tending to something that needed to be done, but gave me the pleasure of helping to shape my life in the direction and with the projects and grounded in the values that are most central to me.

Having a day away from the whirlwind of activity in which I am choosing to involve myself allows me to breathe, to more actively chart my life’s course and to savor its richness.

The space for reflection and deliberate living also lets me tie the various threads of my life that can seem disparate and disconnected and weave them into a single tapestry.

I am grateful.

 

The Boss pays tribute to Levon Helm

I didn’t realize at the time that the fast-talking director was Martin Scorcese, and I loved The Last Waltz from its very first frame.

The Dream Team of guest performers is so impressive it’s hard to believe that they all got together on a single stage (They actually did this in the documentary’s final number.).

Eric Clapton practicing his virtuosity on the guitar.  Muddy Waters’ unforgettable “Well, a well, a well,” as the sweat poured off of him while he was bellowing about being a man-child.  A coked up Neil Young, in a bitter irony, singing “Helpless” with Joni Mitchell as he tries, yes, helplessly, to strum his guitar.

This is all without saying anything about Bob Dylan’s coming on stage to close the show with the ensemble version of “I shall be released.”

Robbie Robertson’s lidded eyes, guile and charm drive the Band’s enormously entertaining interviews, and, in the many times I’ve seen the film, one of my favorites has to be Levon Helm.

The Arkansas native played drums and brought his soulful, country-inflected tones to songs throughout the film-a production he almost immediately repudiated-like “Ophelia,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight.”

Helm died last month after a lengthy battle with cancer-an event that sparked this opening paragraph of a tribute from Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot:

“Levon Helm was the rarest of musical multi-taskers: an unflappable drummer and a singer who wrung soul out of every note. He also was a terrific team player and bandmate; he made the people around him sound good.”

Kot is not the only one impressed by Helm’s talents and contributions.

None other than the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, tipped his hat in words and deeds to Helm in his first-ever concert in Newark, New Jersey last night.

It’s always a treat to see one legend honor another.

I hope you enjoy the clip.